Wow, it's been over two years since I did one of these.
As a daily commuter on the Long Island Rail Road to and from work in Manhattan, I see a lot of things that annoy me.
One of my greatest sources of irritation are people who I have dubbed "Aisle Seat Assholes." If you ride the rails like I do, you might know the kind of people I am describing. They are the ones who as soon as they enter the train, plop themselves down onto the nearest aisle seat, even if the middle and/or window seat next to them is empty. But they are not just assholes for their choice of seat. It's what they do no next that really puts them in the asshole category.
Many of them, immediately after their posteriors have settled onto the seats, whip out their laptop computers, portable dvd players or other mobile devices and plug in their ear buds to drown out the world while people are still boarding the train. And then when you tap them on their shoulder or otherwise get their attention so you can get to the empty two seats to the right of them, they give you this look of annoyance like "How dare you bother me!"
What makes it worse is that if there are a dozen people trying to board the train through one door and the first person tries to get a seat in the first row which already is occupied by an Aisle Seat Asshole (hereinafter "ASA"), everyone has to wait while the ASA gets up, steps out into the aisle, lets the passenger by to occupy the middle or window seat, and then sit down again. Mutiply that four or five times, and sometimes you can find yourself being blocked from getting to a seat for a minute or more.
Maybe it's a quirk of my personality, but to me it seems to make more sense if the first people to enter a train car were to move to the middle of the car and occupy the window seat and the last people get the seats closer to the doors. That way, everyone would get a seat virtually immediately, even if it is not necessarily the exact seat they wanted to get.
I suppose it is too much to expect the bulk of the riders on the Long Island Rail Road to think that way.
2 comments:
My peeve is airline loading - the gate attendant will announce "now boarding passengers in rows 32 to 20". But as you walk down the aisle there are jerks sitting in row 8, 11 and 19! NOT traveling with children, NOT elderly, NOT needing extra time to board!! Drives me nuts.
Robert, maybe some of them put away their cane props after boarding!
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